The Orange County district attorney chided a prosecutor in his office for calling to one of three escaped Southern California inmates “Hannibal Lecter.”

In an interview with the Orange County Register, Deputy District Attorney Heather Brown compared escaped prisoner Hossein Nayeri to the character Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic killer made famous in the film “Silence of the Lambs.”

“My first reaction was: Oh, my God, they let Hannibal Lecter out,” Brown, who is handling the case against Nayeri, told the newspaper Monday. “He is sophisticated, incredibly violent and cunning.” She also called him “diabolical.”

On Tuesday, Brown was the subject of a public reprimand by her boss, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, over the statements, which he called “inappropriate, uninformed, and rash.”

Rackauckas said he gave no prosecutors in his office authorization to give an official position to the media.

Nayeri and two other suspects are alleged to have kidnapped the owner of a marijuana dispensary in 2012. Prosecutors say the three men beat the victim and drove him to the desert, where they tortured him with a blowtorch and cut off his penis.

Prosecutors charged Nayeri with kidnapping for ransom and aggravated mayhem, torture, and burglary.

Last week, the three inmates performed a spectacular prison escape where they sawed through a metal grate, crawled through plumbing tunnels and repelled from the roof of the detention center down a rope made from bed linens. Security experts say the trio likely had help to pull off the daring plan and benefited from the complacency of jail staff.

The Orange County District Attorney’s office under Rackauckas has seen a series of public problems in the past year, stemming from the misuse of jailhouse informants in prosecuting cases.